Adulthood?

Hello friends!

This week featured meeting my cohort (the people in my program who I will take most classes with) and continuing my training for work. It also featured a terrible day for sport on Saturday, where any team I rooted for lost...

But what I want to talk about today is adulthood. I've been thinking about this a bit all week.

For those of you who know me (basically all of you) I am a fan of the casual dress. Steakhouse would say this is a vast understatement. She's been trying to get me on What not to Where forever. If Queer Eye still existed I'm sure there would have been an army to get me on that show. I usually take it in stride. I'm not that bad of a dresser (cue Steakhouse's choking attack) but I do like a very simple look: flip flops, jeans (or sometimes cargo shorts), and a tshirt (usually something from Woot or one of my million University shirts). I don't do anything to my hair, just try to muss it down, and if its really long and rebellious, I'll through a hat on, usually finding more comfort in the backwards baseball cap. I'll also forgo an extensive shave in favor of a scruffy look or even a beard from ear to ear.

All that has changed. Every weekday I have been wearing nice shoes, black socks, good black or khaki pants, a nice belt, a long sleeve collared shirt and a tie. This means I have ironed almost every night I've been here to make the pants and shirt look good. That's right, IRONED. Whatmore, I gel my hair daily, still going for the tuffled look but gelled in place to make it fancy-like. And of course a close shave is also included. Now you may say this is just cuz I'm working in the business school and have to look good. And you're right. But take a look at this as well. On my first day with my Student Affairs cohort. I say student affairs because 90% of Student Affairs jobs seem to have jeans as part of the uniform, to give you an idea of the more casual nature. So I wore my nice jeans, the only ones Steakhouse ever approved of. Then I had a nice Aereopostale (sp?) shirt which looked like two shirts, one with long sleeves one red with a design on it, putting me in school colors. I IRONED that too and then opted to wear my nice shoes again despite the chance for sandals or tennis shoes. That's right, I even took care of my appearance on a non-work day. This can only be a sign of adulthood. Being conscious of my first impressions and dressing up rather then squeezing what I can by. I'm sure Naysayer P Squirrel is shedding a tear and Steakhouse is in apoplectic shock.

Other things that seem strangely adult: reading articles in coffee shops a week early... drinking tea in the morning... washing dishes every day... getting up early to get ready for work and have breakfast...

I'm trying to form good habits before school starts. We'll see how much actually sticks. They say it takes 30 days to form a habit. I hope I can keep up the routine.

One of the things we did during our welcome session was called Strengths Quest. For those of you familiar with Myers-Briggs or DiSC Assessment, this was very very similar. It takes the approach that you are born with certain talents and your environment also hones certain strengths. Often times those talents combined with environmental honing leads to you having certain strengths. IE- You may be naturally good at organizing things. You may have also had a job that forced you to take inventory of a clothing store and put all the clothes back where they belong each day. Your Strength Quest strength then might be "Organization".

So I took the test and its run by Gallup and it came back with the following 5 strengths in this order: Includer, Developer, Harmony, Arranger, Adaptability. These fall into the groups of Relationship Building (4 of them) and Executor (Arranger). Other groups are Influencer and Strategic Thinking. Includer and Harmony are exactly what they sound like: keeping people connected to groups, making sure noone gets left behind or forgotten and building harmony in a group, for me that seems to be through compromises. Adaptability means I'm kinda in the moment and take a go with the flow attitude. Developer means I like to challenge people to take things to the next level or try new things (do I do the Pokeboss?? haha). Arranger makes me sound organized but its not quite like that, its more I follow through with my obligations and prioritize and arrange things to work. It goes nicely with adaptability and Harmony if you think about it.

It definitely made for interesting self assessment. I noticed that these top 5 strengths don't directly address my tendency toward logic and practicality or how I'm a very mental person as well as a talker. They say that we really have 10 top strengths 14 kinda neutral strengths and 10 kinda bottom rung strengths (not weakness per say but things that we are very uncomfortable doing- like for me that would be Focus, staying set on a task for hours and hours and hours on end without any change or movement, I can do it but it'd be hard). Either way it was really interesting and I hope to continue to hone my strengths and enhance those other hidden ones. This assessment definitely fit me to a tee, especially at this point in my life, and I figure it's pretty applicable to student affairs.

I have to wrap it up early. My laptops dying. Tomorrow I finally get internet, so maybe I'll blog again soon.

Goodnight all. This week the goal is to go to the gym with Dandy Woo and others after class. If I keep saying it itll be true.

Reading: Immortal Life of Henrietta Lack- University's first year read that is shaping up to be good.

Listening to: You can't always get what you want- Rolling stones... so fitting

Playing: Fallout New Vegas again. Had some time today